The Internet has become an extremely popular place for authors to publish work and a great deal of new intellectual property is produced every week from all over the world. However, the significance of protecting intellectual property quite often only becomes apparent sometime after the event and consequently a great deal of work is published without significant care being taken to protect the content.
Authors publishing their work on the Internet run the risk of being plagiarised as it is not difficult for an unscrupulous individual to read the work and pass it off as their own. If an author has not taken measures to prove the existence and content of their work at the time it was published, a dispute may arise between the author and the alleged plagiarist as to who produced the work first. In most legal actions proof of the publication date is crucial.
This was less of a problem in a paper world where a physical paper publication would have the date included which would normally be enough to prove publication date. In the electronic world, inclusion of a simple date field is not enough due to the ease of changing the date.
One solution that addresses this problem is to digitally time stamp the publication when it is received. A web-based document authentication service can provide an author with the facility to upload work, store and time stamp it, and show that the author's work existed at a particular point in time.
In such a web-based document authentication service (see FIG. 1A) an author submits a document to the service and a digital time stamp is created and saved on a database.
This solution has its limitations. Primarily, it relies on the author realising the importance of intellectual property within their publication. They must be the active agent in the process and must register with the service and submit a complete document which is kept in its entirety and stored until the time when they wish to prove its existence. It would be more desirable to have a system which will work even if the author does not realise they need to protect their work.
Another is provided by search engine web caching such as demonstrated by GOOGLE.COM™, a trademarked search engine. Instead of the author being required to submit their document to a trusted third party before publishing, the document is published by the author and is identified by a crawler on the Internet as new content. An author can publish a document on the World Wide Web and a search engine retrieves these documents by crawling the web and storing a copy of the cached document in a database. This is called the cached document solution. Such a solution can be performed by any search engine which caches World Wide Web documents. For instance, GOOGLE.COM™, a trademarked search engine, keeps the most recent generation of documents. Another search engine, ARCHIVE.COM™, another exemplary trademarked search engine, keeps many generations of documents.
Although presently, no search engine offers a specific document authentication service as such, one can regard cached documents on a search engine as one level of authentication. Such a cached document solution is shown in FIG. 1B.
One difficulty with the cached document solution is that in order to be effective over a long period of time, the entire World Wide Web would need to be stored on a single file system. The World Wide Web has been growing at an astonishing rate since its creation so this would seem a difficult task. One thing that has been attempted is to store the thumbnails or representations of pages to give users an idea of what content existed in the past. This certainly reduces storage requirements but since it does not store the full content it is of limited use in establishing whether a particular piece of intellectual property existed in the past.
What is needed is a system that can prove that a document was published on the Internet at a certain time/date without having to store the entire document.